Teacher Man. Frank McCourt

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СКАЧАТЬ her to place us in an orphanage, me and my brothers. No, no, never. The shame of it. She hung on. We grew. My brothers and I left school at fourteen, worked, dreamed of America and, one by one, sailed away. My mother followed with the youngest, expecting to live happily ever after. That’s what you’re supposed to do in America, but she never had a moment of happy-ever-after.

      In New York I worked at menial and laboring jobs till I was drafted into the United States Army. After two years in Germany I went to college on the GI Bill to become a teacher. In college there were courses on literature and composition. There were courses on how to teach by professors who did not know how to teach.

      So, Mr. McCourt, what was it like growing up in, you know, Ireland?

      I’m twenty-seven years old, a new teacher, dipping into my past to satisfy these American teenagers, to keep them quiet and in their seats. I never thought my past would be so useful. Why would anyone want to know about my miserable life? Then I realize this is what my father did when he told us stories by the fire. He told us about men called seanachies who traveled the country telling the hundreds of stories they carried in their heads. People would let them warm themselves by the fire, offer them a drop, feed them whatever they were having themselves, listen to hours of story and song that seemed endless, give them a blanket or a sack to cover themselves on the bed of straw in the corner. If the seanachie needed love there might be an aging daughter available.

      I argue with myself, You’re telling stories and you’re supposed to be teaching.

      I am teaching. Storytelling is teaching.

      Storytelling is a waste of time.

      I can’t help it. I’m not good at lecturing.

      You’re a fraud. You’re cheating our children.

      They don’t seem to think so.

      The poor kids don’t know.

      I’m a teacher in an American school telling stories of my school days in Ireland. It’s a routine that softens them up in the unlikely event I might teach something solid from the curriculum.

      One day, my schoolmaster joked that I looked like something the cat brought in. The class laughed. The master smiled with his great yellow horsey teeth and gobs of phlegm stirred and rattled in his gullet. My classmates took that as a laugh, and when they laughed with him I hated them. I hated the master, too, because I knew that for days to come I’d be known in the school yard as the one the cat brought in. If the master had made that remark about another boy I would have laughed, too, because I was as great a coward as the next one, terrified of the stick.

      There was one boy in the class who did not laugh with everyone else: Billy Campbell. When the class laughed, Billy would stare straight ahead and the master would stare at him, waiting for him to be like everyone else. We waited for him to drag Billy from his seat, but he never did. I think the master admired him for his independence. I admired him, too, and wished I had his courage. It never came to me.

      Boys in that Irish school mocked the American accent I had from New York. You can’t go away and leave your accent behind, and when they mock your accent you don’t know what to do or think or feel till the pushing starts and you know they’re trying to get a rise out of you. It’s you against forty boys from the lanes of Limerick and you can’t run, for if you do, you’ll be known as a sissy or a nancy boy the rest of your life. They call you gangster or redskin and then you fight and fight till someone hits you on the nose and you’re pumping blood all over your one shirt, which will get you into terrible trouble with your mother, who will leave her chair by the fire and give you a good clitther on the head for fighting at all. There’s no use trying to explain to your mother that you got all this blood from defending your American accent, which you have because of her in the first place. No, she’ll say, now she has to boil water and wash your bloody shirt and see if she can dry it before the fire so that you can have it for school tomorrow. She says nothing about the American accent that got you into trouble in the first place. But it’s all right because in a few months that accent will disappear to be replaced, thank God, with a Limerick accent anyone but my father would be proud of.

      Because of my father, my troubles were not over. You’d think with my perfect Limerick accent at the age of four the boys would stop tormenting me but, no, they start mimicking my father’s North of Ireland accent and saying he’s some class of a Protestant and now I have to defend him and once more it’s home to my mother with the bloody shirt and my mother yells if she has to wash this shirt one more time it will surely fall apart in her hands. The worst part was the time when she couldn’t get the shirt dry by morning and I had to wear it damp to school. When I came home my nose was stuffed and my whole body shivered with the damp again, this time from sweat. My mother was distracted and cried all over me for being mean to me and sending me to school with that damp shirt that was getting redder and redder from all the fights. She put me to bed and buried me under old overcoats and the blanket from her own bed till the shivering stopped and I drifted off to sleep listening to her downstairs talking to my father and saying it was a sad day they left Brooklyn to have the children tormented in the school yards of Limerick.

      After two days in bed I returned to school in the shirt that was now a pale shade of pink. The boys said pink was a color for sissies and was I a girl?

      Billy Campbell stood up to the biggest of them. Leave the Yank alone, he said.

      Oh, said the big boy. Who’s goin’ to make me?

      I am, said Billy, and the big boy went to the other side of the yard to play. Billy understood my problem because his father was from Dublin and sometimes the boys sneered even at that.

      I told stories about Billy because he had the kind of courage I admired. Then one of my McKee students raised his hand and said it was all right to admire Billy but didn’t I stand up to a whole group over my American accent and shouldn’t I admire myself? I said no, I did only what I had to do with everyone in that Irish school pushing and taunting me, but this fifteen-year-old McKee boy insisted you have to give yourself credit, not too much because that would be bragging. I said, OK, I’d give myself credit for fighting back except that I wasn’t as brave as Billy, who would fight not for himself but for others. He owed me nothing but he still defended me and that was a kind of courage I hoped to have some day.

      My students ask about my family and bits of my past drift into my head. I realize I’m making discoveries about myself and I tell this story the way my mother told a neighbor:

      I was pushing the pram with Malachy in it and him a little fella barely two. Frank was walking along beside me. Outside Todd’s store on O’Connell Street a long black motorcar pulled up to the pavement and out got this rich woman all dressed up in furs and jewelry. Well, didn’t she look into the pram and didn’t she offer to buy Malachy on the spot. You can imagine what a shock that was to me, a woman wanting to buy Malachy with his golden blond hair, his pink cheeks, his lovely little pearly white teeth. He was so lovely there in the pram, and I knew parting with him would break my heart. Besides, what would my husband say if I came home and told him I sold the child? So I told the woman no and she looked so sad my heart went out to her.

      When I grew older and heard her tell that story for the hundredth time, I said she should have sold Malachy and there would have been more food for the rest of us. She said, Well, I offered you but the woman wasn’t a bit interested.

      Girls in the class said, Aw, gee, Mr. McCourt, your mother shouldn’t have done that to you. People shouldn’t offer to sell their children. You ain’t so ugly.

      Boys in the class said, Well, he ain’t no Clark Gable. Just kiddin’, Mr. McCourt.

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